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The Beautiful Chaos of 1,000 Trackmania Racers 74

Posted by Zonk from the so-shiny dept.
Mark Wallace writes "This 3-minute video of 1,000 runs of the same Trackmania Sunrise road course, overlaid on each other, turns the game into a gorgeous picture of an ordered system tending toward chaos. The pack starts out in perfect shape and becomes a glorious mess by the end of the course. Plus, it's just beautiful stuff." I'm normally not one for linking videos, but this is a great way to spend a few minutes on a Tuesday morning.
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The Beautiful Chaos of 1,000 Trackmania Racers More

The Beautiful Chaos of 1,000 Trackmania Racers

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  • Hmm, I can't see any video on that page.. Can someone who *can* tell me if it's embedded WMP or Flash? Or perhaps a download link I'm missing?

    • Re:Can't see it... (Score:5, Informative)

      by interiot ( 50685 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:12AM (#16043861) Homepage
      Some other links of the same video.... YouTube [youtube.com], Gametrailers hosted on another site [joystiq.com]
      • I'm afraid to compare. Are the other versions of the video as startlingly loud as the YouTube one?
        That's a pet peeve of mine, especially on YouTube where the videos are rarely normalized with each other in volume.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 )
      They use JavaScript to detect if you have flash or not, so you need to enable JS. I don't see why they can't just embed the flash directly and let the user click on it if they don't have flash, which will take them to the flash download site anyways.

      • Re:Can't see it... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:26AM (#16043955) Homepage Journal
        I don't see why they can't just embed the flash directly and let the user click on it if they don't have flash, which will take them to the flash download site anyways.

        Because then you could activate AdBlock and NoScript and still see the stuff you WANT to see on the page with minimal hassle, which, if enough people do it, would piss off advertisers and lose them ad revenue.
        • I've got the flashblock extension for Firefox. It automatically blocks all flash, with a transparent placeholder frame and small icon that I can click on to play the flash.

      • Re:Can't see it... (Score:4, Informative)

        by masklinn ( 823351 ) <.slashdot.org. .at. .masklinn.net.> on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:36AM (#16044026)

        Sometimes JS is used to detect if you actually have flash (and have alternate content replaced by flash if you don't), or to check for your flash version (and display alternate content if your version isn't high enough) or to be able to lay HTML elements on top of flash, or... and because it's much easier to just call a script and a pair of JS functions than to fill 6 or 7 redundant lines of object and embed

        Two widely used Flash integration scripts are Unobtrusive Flash Objects and SWFObject, check them out if you're interrested in web stuff.

      • It's possible the js also handles the Eolas workaround. There's no reason not to use javascript to draw the object into the HTML for non-IE browsers (except that it doesn't work if js is turned off, but then, what does any more?) and you need to do that on IE6 if you don't want messages popping up on people's screen, making you look like a moron.

    • Re:Thanks, Zonk, for bringing this to our attentio (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Check out the 3k volcano also.
      http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z-YxQ398Kjw&NR [youtube.com]
    • It reminds me a lot of being driven around Genoa, Italy earlier this year by a lovely but utterly terrifying young Russian woman I work with.

      Except that traffic had inter-car collision-detection enabled. Eeek.
      • That's what's beautiful about this video. If they did a simulation with clipping on, it would be the same old thing. This is a relatively new idea (at least for me), which is why is brightened up the start of my week so effectively.

        It'd be interesting to see this in platform games (ex: mario 64), though it'd be a bit cluttered if you tracked each mario AND goomba together. I dunno.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Doctor Memory ( 6336 )
        Funny, it reminded me of the film Rendesvous [amazon.com]. Film director Claude Lelouch drives a Ferrari (275SWB?) across town. The town is Paris, and the trip across town takes nine minutes. Just. Fucking. Amazing.
        • The cool thing about Rendezvous is that the director just slapped a camera on the side of his car (a V-12 powered Ferrari) and took off through the streets of Paris. No permits, no closed streets, just the real deal -- the near misses are for real. The game video was pretty neat, too!

          Cool links. [blogspot.com]
          • How is being a jackass street racing 'cool'? This mentality has to be stopped - being a reckless asshat ripping around at ridiculous speeds in a city is how hundreds of people are killed every year.

            Then it inspires a generation of retards that don't know how to drive to try and reproduce tihs in their own town. We have a major street racing problem happening and it's a direct result of this kind of video.

            Keep the idiotic behavior in the simulations and off the streets please
            • Two words: natural selection.

              Three more words: deal with it.

              Cool links. [blogspot.com]
              • if these retards were only killing themselves, I'd say 'have at it', all the better. But when hundreds (thousands?) of people are killed every year due to idiots racing around the streets, it becomes exponentially worse.

                Anyone whining about terrorism should look at the automobile fatality rates around the world - the TRUE terrorists are people driving 3000 lb moving weapons pretending they are all 'cool' while street racing.

                http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/ [dot.gov]

                Fatalities
                drivers & passengers: 37,594
                pedestrians
        • The sound was probably a Ferrari, but the car certainly wasn't.

          It was a Mercedes Benz 450SEL 6.9 [wikipedia.org], a truly legendary machine. You can see part of the grille here [axe-net.be].

          It is a great piece of film, one of my favourites.
  • Thanks :)

  • gradius video (Score:3, Informative)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:21AM (#16043923)
    I can't see the video cos all of the sites listed so far are blocked at work (I'll check it out when I get home). But the description sounds similar to the Gradius video [slashdot.org] that was posted here on Slashdot a while back.

  • Breathtaking... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by frenchy64 ( 965930 )
    Amazing stuff, apparently achieved by 1000 simulateous replays which would have taken absolutely forever! Kudos to whoever made it!

    • Re:Breathtaking... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Reapman ( 740286 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:43AM (#16044076)
      Trackmania is a real amazing game... I always think of it as what Hotwheels on the PC SHOULD be. Screw physicis and realism, driving upside down for about 3 seconds on some massive half pipe is like virtually racing those hotwheels people had/have as a kid.

      Played a ton of it at a big lan party called Fragapalooza, got more then a few people walking up and asking what it was. One of those $20 games that I got more enjoyment out of then some $60 ones.

      • Re:Breathtaking... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:54AM (#16044161) Homepage
        One of those $20 games that I got more enjoyment out of then some $60 ones.

        ... And in the case of Trackmania Nations [trackmanianations.com], it's free. Done with sponsorship from NVidia and some gaming tournament, apparently - there's in-game advertising, yes, but it looks perfectly natural since it's inside a colossal stadium.

        It's a strange multiplayer game, in that the lack of inter-car collisions means you can't actually interact with your opponents in a physical sense - but when I played it a few months ago, there's a great social aspect to it all.

        One important factor is that despite being a free game, you can still design your own tracks - bolt together big sections of prefabricated track units, and share the results with your friends. It's great fun.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by OctoberSky ( 888619 )
          When Ford Perfect says "you can still design your own tracks" he means "pretty much every track is made by a user" There are about 60 NADEO (game maker) tracks and probably well over 100K tracks on more than 300 worldwide servers (1.4 million players).
          You have to actively search to find a server that plays the NADEO tracks if that's your thing but the user tracks can be amazing... they can also suck.

          If you own one of the other games in the Trackmaina series (TM original or TM Sunrise) you can "activate" you

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by SScorpio ( 595836 )
          Beware to those who care. Unless it's changed the free Trackmania Nations still installs Starforce even though it doesn't require cd checks for obvious reasons. Just a heads up for the people who hate Starforce.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by bornbitter ( 813458 )
        "...driving upside down for about 3 seconds..."
        I don't know how doing that is screwing physics. The Saleen, (I think it was '98 or '97, can't remember the year), has enough aerodynamic downforce at 120mph to literally fly. If you had this baby going that fast, you could theoretically drive upside-down, (through a tunnel or something I guess), until you slowed down below 120. I don't know how long the gas in the tank would last, or if it would still feed fuel in that position, bu
  • That's pretty neat, but I would have preferred more wide overhead angles to see the overall flow of cars, there were way too many close up views that didn't really show much beyond a traffic jam.

    Oh, and the race starts at 48 seconds, you can ffwd past the overly long credits at the start.
    • Or my second (after "my god, how much trailer are they going to run?")... this looks cool but I'd be MUCH more interested in a view that tracked the cars and showed them behaving like a fluid...

      How did they do it, OGLE?

  • New Movie? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anne_Nonymous ( 313852 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:32AM (#16044005) Homepage Journal
    I didn't know they were making a Blues Brothers III.
  • I especially like how they all fly into the ocean. Remind anyone of an old Rockstar game [wikipedia.org] or maybe just a rodent [wikipedia.org]? I mean seriously, these cars seem intent upon their own demise.
  • along with the swarm of locusts?

    yeah... now it's a swarm of YELLOW cars!

    *makes appointment with therapist*
  • There's a similar video out there (it's on youtube) but using 3000 replays. In that one all the cars are red, it actually looks quit a lot like lava flowing down a mountain. Fairly impressive way to simulate a fluid.

  • I got bored watching the credits, can anyone tell me who won?

  • Beautimous. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rachel Lucid ( 964267 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @09:59AM (#16044192) Homepage Journal
    Now where the hell can I find this game? It looks like shitloads of fun. :)

  • WARNING! A PUN APPROACHES! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @10:43AM (#16044497)
    Nice car-ticle system...

    That's right. I went there.

  • How? (Score:2)

    by misleb ( 129952 )
    How did he get the camera to follow the exact same path in each run? Doesn't the camera usually follow the car?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by iainl ( 136759 )
      Trackmania allows your previous laps to be seen as ghost cars, so I presume that's how its done.
  • I am part of the development team of the game, or I must say of the tool. And it is really cool to see players to use the game like this. They are the stars of this type of games, like the actors are for movies. I find it funny that the most seen video on gametrailers now is made by a player. Players has big talents and they are like a processor into the game, a creative one.
    • Please release the next version of the game with a copy protection system other than Starforce. Securerom or Tages work great without taking over your system. Or even better release the original version on Steam and you won't need anything other than the protection offered by Steam. This will get me to purchase the game, while I've heard good things about it I refuse to purchase anything that uses the cancer that is Starforce.
  • I found the originals:
    Original 1K Project [youtube.com]
    3k Project [youtube.com]

    Anyone know where the 2k Project or a crisper version of the 3k Project are?

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